Interview with Mae C. Boyd

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Mae Boyd, April 29, 1981 - Memories/Havre de Grace Harford County Library oral History Collection
Q:
BOYD:
Where were you born?
I was born at 823 Erie Street, Havre de Grace, Maryland. That's three or four streets up - four streets up, I think. We lived on what you'd call a little farm. It had a lot of horses and cows. My father had a big garden. Of course, he had nine children to raise. I was the youngest of nine, and I outlived every one of them. They didn't expect to raise me when I was growing up, though, at all, and here I am and they're all dead. So I'm here - must be for a reason.
Q: You said it was a farm?
MB: We called it a farm. He had a lot of land. It was in the city limits, but it had a lot of ground to it. So we called it a farm, see, because he had a lot of horses and cows. He raised everything but pigs in turkeys. And they had a branch that ran through the land. We swam in it in the summer because it was deep enough, and then skated on it in the winter time, too.
Across from that, he rented a house-like.
The man turned it into a bakery. Oh, we used to go down there and that man used to give us all kinds of cookies. Of course, we were fascinated with the beads on top. We called them "beads" -
colored candy they were. We were always over there and he was always giving us something from the bakery, my sister and I. She was two years older. We were down there a lot - through the woods. Picked flowers. They were all wildflowers. You don't even see those kind of flowers anymore - calves' lips and jack-in-the­ pulpits and all that kind. And we weren't even afraid of snakes. I don't remember ever seeing any, but it was like a woods attached to the place.
We had a wonderful childhood, though - all of us did. Some people can't say that. It's kids today, a lot of them haven't had. All they do is dope. We never heard the word "dope." Nobody ever heard tell of taking dope years ago like they do now, or anything like that. Everything you did was, I'd say, wholesome fun. Today it isn't.
They can't be satisfied with anything, it seems like.
Q: Did your father do farming or did he do something
else besides that?
MB: He farmed that, yes. Q: What did they raise?
MB: They raised all kinds of crops. He had a big field up above that he rented that put in tomatoes. We all picked tomatoes, don't think we
didn't, till we got tired of looking at tomatoes. And then, my brother-in-law had a truck. He took them down to the ketchup factory and he sold it to there, and they made ketchup out of them.
Q: Where was that at?
MB: That was up by Angel Hills Cemetery - that big lot (I guess it's still there) this side of it, coming down the hill.
Q: And they made ketchup there.
MB: No. They made ketchup downtown in the -- What was the name of that place? I don't know if you're familiar with Havre de Grace, where they made the ketchup downtown - this big building. where a lot of people worked.
Q: I've never heard about that. MB: You didn't?
Q: No.
MB: Nobody mentioned it , I guess. They had a place here where they built ships, a shipbuilding place downtown, too. I'm surprised somebody didn't mention that.
They had a store downtown, next to the old
post office (you know where the old post office was?) called Mattingly's. Men used to congregate in there. He sold cigars and the best chocolate candy you ever tasted and all kinds of hard candy
BOYD 4
and everything like that. So the men used to go in there. When you used to go in there for candy, you couldn't see anything for smoke. You could cut the smoke with a knife in there when you were kids. Everybody went in town for that candy. Of course, the men went in there to congregate and swap stories and all kinds of stuff like that.
They had the Ledger office here. That's out of business now. The Democratic Ledger was in business here for years. Leo and Joe Moore ran that. Of course, they had The Record, too. It was called The Record and it was called the Havre de Grace Republican then. And then, the Democratic Ledger was on this end of it.
When we came from school, of course we had to change our clothes to keep them clean for the next day. And then, we took the roller skates and went skating down to the corner all over the pavements that were there. Down from our house, down this hill, was like stones. There wasn't any pavement there. My heavens, it's all different now up Erie street. And before, up above us, they had what they called "Lilly Run" - a ranch-like where this dye You could smell this dye that came from the mill out there where they did all kinds of stuff to dye the materials. You could smell that
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all the time, coming down through this Lilly Run. That's all cleared out now. You can go all the way up there with cars, up to the next street. We couldn't before, unless you went through fields. [chuckles] Oh, my lands, I can remember all that. That's interesting.
Q: Yes, that is interesting. What was the town like
while you were growing up? everybody?
Did you know
MB:
Oh, yes. Everybody knew everybody. Every store was doing a prosperous business. Everybody was making some money. Looks like a ghost town now.
I'll tell you, there weren't as many what they call "tap rooms" as there are now. Every other place is a bar or something downtown now. Of course, they're making it all historical.
And that old lock house, we used to play in that. The water from the canal there used to be all around that first floor. We weren't a bit afraid. All of us kids uptown used to go in there and didn't think a thing of it. You know, you might get drowned or something like that. When you're young, you've got a lot more nerve than you have when you get older. You lose it, I think. I know I have on a lot of things. Afraid of this and afraid of that now.
We used to swim all over that river. Of course, we used to go out there when we couldn't swim, and float, a lot of us from all around the neighborhood. It was always (chuckles ) to keep you from getting drowned, I guess. We weren't afraid at all down there, and that river was really deep then. Don't think it wasn't. Of course, it was safer and cleaner than it is now,
too. I think they're dredging it all out and getting some of that pollution out of there - emptying out the water.
But we weren't allowed to go out on the river to skate at night. My brother and sister went, and her friend and his friend, which was a man friend. Of course, she had a man friend, Nellie
[ ], the oldest one. They were wonderful skaters. They skated all the way up to
before that dam was ever thought of, down to the park in the moonlight. But none of us younger ones were allowed to go. They had a good time, I think they did. And that river used to be frozen to the bottom every winter. Now, people around here, the young ones, don't believe that when you tell them. But it's been frozen since I grew up. Yes. When you could walk clear across
through. It wouldn't, I'd call it, defrost till spring. It wouldn't melt.
I don't remember the ice gorge. My cousin had died some time ago. He lived in
He was just, I guess, a little boy then when that was going on. He remembered it, though. They said it was terrible. I don't know.
Q: Was Garrett Island the B&O Island?
MB: Yes.
Q: Is that where your grandfather lived?
MB: Yes. Garrett Island, it was called. I couldn't remember that when I was telling that before on the phone. I couldn't remember the name of the island. I just said "B&O''· They had a tough time over there. Don't think they didn't. A lot of the children got malaria. A lot of cattle died.
After that, they had so much tough luck after their father died, they moved over here to McCabe's place which was up near the quarry. It was a farm.
My father was married twice. He had two
children. His first wife died when she was thirty-two. And then, after they moved over here to this place, my mother, who was from Chester, came down to visit some people on the other farm and he met her. That's how they got married. And
they had seven children. I was the last one of those. But she raised his two children. One was three years old, a boy, and the girl was seventeen months old. They didn't know anybody as their mother but her because they were real young when their mother died. We were all raised up together.
Q: What was your father's name?
MB: Michael Patrick Boyd. Four brothers in that family, Boyds, later on married four Conners women. They all had big families, so we were all double cousins. That's unusual. We never
even sent that to Ripley. We never even thought about that because he had in there two one time (two brothers and two sisters), but we never heard tell of four. I have one double cousin left.
She's ninety-two years old and lives down in Leesburg, Florida. I haven't seen her for years. We're the only double cousins left out of that bunch - a lot of them. Yes, I'd like to see her, but I don't expect to get down there. She never comes up this way. She used to live up this way and work here.
She went to Florida with my sister and
several young women years ago. Of all things, they had a man chaperon that went down on the boat
from Baltimore to Florida to work in those big hotels. Years ago, that's all the work they could get. She met this fellow, Ned Stevens , and eloped with him in no time, never told any of the women she was working with she was going to get married or anything. My sister made her dress and didn't even know she was going to get married or anything like that. They've lived down there forever. [chuckles) So that was love at first sight, I guess. They stayed together. He's dead now though.
Q: What was your school like? Where did you go to school?
MB: I went to the old school that they tore down -
Havre de Grace School where they tore down to build the gymnasium. Oh, boy, everybody hated to see that place torn down. That would have been a historical spot if it hadn't been. Yes.
Q: What was it like, going to school there?
MB: It was fine. We had a long walk from Erie Street, though, and walk home to your lunch, too. Lots of times, we skated to school on the sleet, but then
to skate on the river when we were old enough. My mother let us go down there, several more And my brothers went, too, so they could look out for you. One of them had to look out for us all the time. The older ones had to look after the younger ones. That gave them some responsibility, she thought. Well, I guess it did. Yes.
I've talked to you several times, but never met you. I asked my niece, Margie Joseph, if she knew you, because she knows nearly everybody up around Claire and all around here. She said no, she didn't.
I'll tell you what else they had in this­ town, and I wish they had it now. They had two nice movie houses. One was I don't think it was called The State then. Mr. Lester Lindsey ran it one time. The other one was The Opera House. Down there, they used to have plays. And they used to have, a lot of the time, a certain night of the week at The Opera House, a picture. And then, they'd have all these prizes. You'd keep the other end of your ticket. You'd have to go up on the stage and pick up a bunch of pans or
Of course, they'd all laugh at you and the different things you had to pick up. Some of them wouldn't go do it. They gave their ticket to
BOYD 11
somebody else. And they had groceries they gave away. Imagine giving groceries away now. They wouldn't do that. Well, the first thing you know, they didn't have it.
They had a library down in the City Hall, downstairs. That was the first, I think, library here. That was nice and near, too. Miss Sally Galloway was my eighth grade teacher. She had charge of the library there, one of the women.
But when I went to school, when I got in the tenth grade, Nellie Barron was teaching this commercial course I took. They had a new system there in bookkeeping. You know, I couldn't get that in my head for love nor money. I passed
in everything but that, so I didn't get back the next year to graduate because I'd have to take that same thing over. Several of us didn't. But that next year, they had a night school out here. It took up a little bit of everything and arithmetic and all that stuff. So I got a paper there. (chuckles ] I couldn't tell you where the paper is now though. I guess you'd call that a diploma then. If I knew you'd have to have the same teacher and the same thing, I probably wouldn't pass it again. I'd have stayed home then.
Q: After you got done with school, what did you do?
BOYD 12
MB: Downtown, they had the Baltimore Life Insurance.
Every summer, they took a different young woman in there to work three months the insurance books of the Baltimore Life Insurance.
They took me one year. Three months' work there. Then, I worked in the defense plant later on.
It used to be Frafrizio's up here. Haven't you ever heard of that place up above the B&O Railroad? Do you live in Blair?
Q: Yes.
MB: That's why you don't know too much about it here, I guess. They turned it into a defense plant where they ''filled the caps to kill the Japs, they called it. They had this thing. It looked like a sewing machine. It worked something like it. They made you drink. They gave you a pint of milk every day. You had to drink it whether you kept in down or not. I was real skinny for years. I think I weighed ninety-eight pounds till I was fifty. Now, I'm trying to get it off and I can't seem to do much with it. This lady across from us where I lived on Sigga Street then, they gave her a pint of milk, too. See, because this glue would affect your throat somehow if you didn't take the milk to take away the poison. If she drank milk, she'd go out in the backyard and bring it all up
there. So I drank her milk. I drank half a pint of somebody else's. I could drink all the milk I wanted because we had cows years ago and we were raised on milk and cream. It didn't make me fat at all or sick either. And the man thought they drank it, see, because nobody told him any different. But she didn't get anything wrong with her throat.
So I worked there. Didn't make much. Well, at that time, I guess it was all right. Eighteen dollars a week is all we got. Of course, you paid the man down the street a dollar or two to take you up there with five or six people in the car and bring you home. But it was interesting.
And then, they wanted two volunteers to work down in this building that had nothing in it but barrels of powder. That shows how you have nerve when you're young. None of the men would volunteer. So the lady across from me, my neighbor, Edith Hobson -- We went around together a lot. She came over to my house and I went over to hers. Just a nice, old lady. They said they wanted somebody to go down and nobody volunteered. I thought, somebody's got to go down there and do that or we won't have any work here. I said, "Well, I'll go down there."
So this lady said, "If Mae's going to get blown through the roof, I'm going to get blown through with her. I'll go down with her."
We went down there in this building and worked. You had to wear certain shoes on your feet. I think they were kind of like a sneaker. You couldn't spill one drop of powder on the floor because the friction, they said, would cause a fire. So every fifteen minutes, the boss would come down to see if we were still alive, he said. But you know, I wasn't bit afraid and neither was she. We stayed down there all the time till that place, I guess, was finished. Good Lord, it was something. I wouldn't do it again for love nor money, no - or a lot more things I did either.
I couldn't get over those men. I thought they're crazy or something. They should have gone down there. But they didn't want to go through the roof either, I guess. But nothing happened though.
They gave these -- It was a wooden tray. It
had about twelve little plastic They looked like vials like medicine would come in, only a little narrower. We would fill those with powder and leave the lids off alongside of it, and then send them up. The man would come down and take a
bunch of them up there to these people that would put the cap on with this glue from this machine. And then, they'd take them, I guess, over there to shoot the Japs with. That was something. I don't know why we did it, but we did. I think the men should have gone, but they didn't. I told them they were all a bunch of chickens up there, [chuckles) which they were. They were something.
It seems like there's a few years that I can't remember everything when I was sort of growing up. I can remember it when nobody's around here [chuckles) and put it down.
Q: What about being a practical nurse?
MB: There's my diploma. I went up to Philadelphia to the National School of Nursing and took that up.
Q: Why did you decide to do that? Were you interested in it?
MB: Well, I should have really gone in to be an R.N. after I finished and got a diploma, which I finally got a diploma. See? The girl across the street, Margaret Quirk, wanted me to go in, and several of my friends down at Mercy Hospital. But I wasn't interested in it then. When I got older, like middle-aged, I wanted a profession of some kind where I could go out and make some money, so I took that up. My niece is an R.N. up in
Media, Pennsylvania. She taught me how to give needles in the grapefruit and orange, like they teach you. She taught me a lot of stuff. So I think that's why I got along so well with examinations, the tests, because she had taught me so much ahead of time. The woman said, "Are you sure you haven taken this up some place else?"
I said, "No, this is the first time." I didn't tell her she taught me this stuff, see. I thought I didn't have to tell her that. What they don't know won't hurt them.
I got some nice jobs. I got some that
weren't so nice. Of course, I didn't stay on. those. Just leave till you find something better.
Q: How would you get your jobs?
MB: I would put an ad in the paper. I went up to New York after graduating to visit my cousins - just to visit. They said, "Mae, why don't you try to get something to do around here? Maybe you could find something close to us." They lived in Baldwin, Long Island.
I said, "Do you think something would turn up for me here?"
She said, "Yes. Try it."
I answered was over at Hicksville. The man had a son and a daughter. The daughter was an alcoholic, as I found out when I go there. The mother was a mentally sick woman. She had been in all the institutions and they couldn't help her.
The last one she was in, that she'd come out of the day I went there They didn't tell me she was like that. I don't know whether I would have gone there or not. Because she was really bad.
They had her in Saint Vincent's, which is supposed to be the best mental institution up there in New York around that part. They brought her home one Sunday afternoon and came over to my cousins and got me, and took me over there, the girl did. Of course, she was a little tipsy, but we got there all right. It seems like nothing ever happened to her in driving anyway. So we got over there, and I said, "I can't take care of that woman unless you have a hospital bed. This bed's too low. I'd
break my back for sure, taking care of anybody in bed." so they got a hospital bed from the Red Cross people, and she came.
She was what you call a "violent mental case. II They teach you how to do that when you have to take care of them. After she was home a while, she came out in the kitchen. She had this
doctor come to see her name was Mary Kelner. cousin over in Israel.
, and her She had married her first
It's a put-up job, see, to
marry her off. He was thirty-five years older
than her. They had these two children. They always resented their father because they said he was old enough to be their grandfather. He died before I got there. I understand it's the girl, being an alcoholic, is what set her mother off, and I think it had a whole lot to do with it, too. But the
boy was wonderful to her. Jeanette ( ], her name was. His was Stanley ( ]. They were Jewish people. Everybody I've worked fo seemed like were Jews, but they were all German Jews, and they claim they're the best to work for. I thought they were, the ones I had.
She was out in the kitchen one day. This doctor was going to come to see how she ate, see what she ate. So I got her lunch all ready.
Before she sat down, she opened this drawer where all the butcher knives, scissors, and everything were kept in there, and garden scissors. She pulled out this butcher knife, and she said to me, "I could kill you right there, closer than we are, in front of you."
(chuckles] Everything's going through my
head. Don't think it wasn't. I said, "But you wouldn't do that to me."
So while I was telling her that, she had it in her hand. You grab both their wrists and hold them tight. She dropped it. I said, "You know, it's time for you to sit down here now and eat your lunch because the doctor will be here pretty soon."
He came. While he was out there, he saw what she ate. After she got finished, I said, "It's time for you to take a nap," and I told him what she did.
He said, "That was quick thinking on that stuff."
I said, "Yes, but that's what they taught us in school."
Later on, when it came time for her to get a bath, she had to sit on the toilet. She couldn't get in the shower which they had or a tub. I had to keep her fingernails cut real close. Somehow or other this finger Her nails were sharp that day anyway, but they were short. So she grabbed me here (chuckles] while she was on the toilet.
She didn't want to get a bath, so she fought against it. I said, "We can get a bath some other time or tomorrow." She dug me. I still have the
mark there. I guess I'll carry it to my grave. And bleed! Of course, I had to get him over there and he cauterized it, her doctor. He went in there and talked to her and gave her a good talking to. See, she did these things because she couldn't remember she did them. You couldn't hold that against her then.
I stayed till she died - I guess about a year. She took these blood clots in her legs and died at four o'clock one afternoon in the hospital. She was a nice person till she got these kind of spells like.
Jeanette used to come over there and bring these girlfriends of hers in the evening. They actually would be drunk. I said, "Jeanette, what are you bringing these people over here for? Why do you come over when you're in this condition?
You know what it does to your mother. It gets her all upset. You have it to put up with after they go home." So she didn't come anymore much after that. They had a lovely home up there in Hicksville on Laura Street, I remember.
Somebody told me years ago that you haven't
lived till you lived in Brooklyn. I'd never seen Brooklyn before in my life till I went to New York. I worked in the old part of Brooklyn and
worked in the new part. So I saw both places and I thought, "Well, I don't know what's in either one of them. I don't know why anybody would make that remark." I probably didn't know what they meant anyway. I stayed on one street. I had six jobs, I think, in three weeks' time on one street. One would tell you about the other one when that one died. One of them did die. No, I think two died that were half dead when you went there.
One was a Polish Jewish man. Oh, he was awful! He used to chase you around the room and this and that and everything else. He had a wife right there. I came to take care of his wife She had a glass eye and you had to take care of her eye, give her a bath, or something like that.
They had a little, tiny, three-room apartment. He had diabetes. He used to go up the street when he wouldn't eat dinner. He did all the cooking. I didn't have to do any cooking. I didn't care about that, either. He did it. The men usually do in a Jewish family.
They had to make the living room in to my bedroom. They put curtains up. You couldn't get out in that kitchen, to the icebox or anything, unless you came through my room. At three o'clock in the morning -- He was a giant, big man. He looked like one of those men that are sewn together. I call them" looking men." He was old - eighty-some years old. This big, tall shadow, I saw. We had to leave a light on at night for the bathroom. I saw this shadow coming through, and it started in my room. I said, "What the hell are you doing in my room? (chuckles]
You don't belong in here. What are you doing?"
He said, "I'm going out in the kitchen to get that last piece of apple pie."
I said, "No, you're not. You're not supposed to have it anyway. You get the devil back in your room where you belong or I'm going to call your daughter over and I'm going to get out of here leave."
so he went back to bed then. I called the daughter up the next day. I said, "Your father's been acting crazy for a long time around here. I can't stay on this job." I gave them week's notice or two week's and left. They had a colored practical nurse ahead of me that had the same
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problems I was. She quit, too. I thought, "It's not worth it." She was a nice person though.
He wasn't supposed to touch her glass eye at all. This morning, he said he could take care of her eye. I said, "You're not allowed to touch her eye. Your fingers aren't clean or anything like that. You leave her eye alone." He did it anyway, and he cut her eye with his nail inside, so it started to bleed. His daughter came over there. And they had a daughter that lived upstairs, too, in the upstairs apartment. She came down and she banged him around. Don't think she didn't.
She said, "Miss Boyd, do you think my father's crazy?"
I said, "No. He's just getting real senile or something, or maybe a little crazy, too."
She said, "I can't stand him, and he's my own father." (chuckles) And she lived upstairs. Oh, my, they had a time there.
But, you know, I never knew -- A glass eye reminds me of something like a contact lens. It's real thin; it's real tiny. You just pop it right in and pop it out again like you do those. Of course, you have to wash your eye out afterwards. You had to do that a couple times a day.
I've had a lot of cancer cases - all kinds, inside and out. Terrible though, some of them. One lady I took care of up in Jamaica. I went to visit her, too. She got sick and just stayed there. She had a lump that was inside of her jaw. She was seventy-five years old then and a lovely person, too. After a while, it broke out and it came like three great big boils on the outside of her face. Her whole face opened up. It just reminded me of a canal. You could look through this opening about that wide in her cheek and see all the way down her throat. That woman suffered and she never complained. She never complained once about the pain. When the doctor came and was giving her these double needles so she wouldn't feel it, it didn't do any good. She died there in bed. Went down to skin and bones. She just lived a year, like they do. But she wasn't operated on or anything. Just wasted away.
When they took her to the undertaker up there, they couldn't keep her face together. So she was buried here in Havre de Grace in
where they're all buried here - Catholics. They tried it down at Pennington's, and they couldn't keep it together either. So they had to bury her in a closed casket. That was
the worst thing I ever did see, I think, for
cancer. All kinds of stuff.
Of course, when I started
out first, I took
care of the babies when their mothers came home
with them from the hospital, when they were young.
I wasn't that young, but I love kids anyway. When
I was going to get married, the fellow died. I
probably would have had a family and been a grandmother.
Yesterday, I got this (end of side one)
Were you taking that down?
Q: Yes.
card.
MB: Holy mackerel! I thought you hadn't started yet.
Oh, my. Hope I wasn't talking Q: No.
too much.
MB: What have you got on that Q: I've written down some of
paper?
the things you had said
about. What about the blacksmith on ?
MB: Oh, Lord, yes. That was too bad. That place
really isn't there now. That would have been some
historical spot. I forgot to say that hooked on
to that blacksmith shop was a wheelwright shop run
by Thomas Young. He lived down the street from
us. He used to sharpen all the tools and
everything there. Now it's an apartment house and
store where the blacksmith shop used to be. I think the whole place is now, all the way across.
Q: Do you remember people having horses and buggies in Havre de Grace?
MB: Yes. We even had a sleigh. We had a wonderful time because, see, we had horses. Pop had a sleigh and a horse. We used to go out in that sleigh every We had big snowstorms years ago. And it lasted a long time. We don't have those snowstorms much anymore - once in a while.
My father said they had races, horses, somehow or another with sleds on this river out here when it was frozen to the bottom in his day. Yes, they used to go down there and watch them. I don't know whether they were in them or not.
They used to take those sled rides. I think somebody wrote that down, that I was talking to. They used to stop at different houses that were mapped out in Havre de Grace for refreshments - like different countries would have this. That country would serve. The Italians would have an Italian dinner or some refreshments of Italian food. My sisters all went to that because they were older. My father had a big sled and put a lot of straw in it. It was like a straw ride when there was snow. My brothers went, too, to drive
the horses. They all enjoyed it. Of course, he charged for that. Never charged very much for anything years ago. He said he worked for a dollar a day many times when he was working.
Later on, he worked for the railroad. He cut
those banks off for the railroad. If he could come back now and see those terrible-looking banks, he wouldn't believe it (chuckles) because you could eat off of that grass. It just looked like velvet when he got finished with it. Later on, before he died, he got into the real estate business - bought and sold houses.
He lived to be eighty-two. My mother died when she was sixty-four. Now, years ago, they said, "Oh, she's old," when the people in the neighborhood came to see her in there, laid out. Today, that's young - sixty-four. Everybody says it is, anyway. We missed her. Don't think we didn't. She died so quick. She was only sick two days, and she was gone. Ulcerated stomach, they said it was. He lived sixteen years after her.
We had five girls in the family and four boys
- nine, counting the two sets. We enjoyed ourselves, though, up on that land and all that stuff we did. I'd swing down there. We put up swings. Every summer, all our relations came down
because there was always plenty to eat. He had a big garden in the back. They rode the horses till they nearly killed them. So we had to stop that. It sweated them up so much. City people weren't
used to horses or anything. down there, and stayed the
They did everything whole summer. We were
glad to see them all go home. [chuckles] We had
a houseful all the time. He built the house we
lived in. It's still there.
Q: Is it?
MB: Oh, yes - on Erie Street. shutters. But the people Italians and this man said
It was white with green who have it now are
his wife wanted that
green -- I don't know what it. What do you call that?
color green he called Aluminum siding put
on. He liked the white with the green shutters.
I said, "It looks like your she wanted." But it looked green than it does now.
He sold the place when
wife got what prettier white with
we left -- we hated to
leave that place, though, and come down to Sigga
Street -- and bought Russell the corner. It had an iron
Reasons big house on fence all the way
around it. I see the man's taken that down now.
I don't know what he did that for. There wasn't
anything wrong with the fence. That house was so
big that we moved into. It had a fireplace in every room. All the rooms on the third floor had walk-in fireplaces. Down in the kitchen, they had this big fireplace and they had all these brass things - I guess the people that lived there years ago. He kept on with it. The Reasons only lived in two rooms. He lived there with his mother and his sister. They only used the bedrooms. The living room was never used. They had like two living rooms together and a big hall that went from the front door all the way out to the kitchen. It had porches all over that place.
Plenty of room and great big rooms - sixteen by sixteen and high ceilings. It was nice and cool in summer. They had porches inside and out. They had a horse chestnut tree that my father got that down and built a garage out in the yard in the place. We had two English walnut trees there.
You never had to buy any kind of nuts for anything. Little ones coming in the back. All kinds of old-fashioned flowers, I guess, that were planted there. Grape vines and everything like that. We really had a good time in that house.
Don't think we didn't. And they still came, the people in the summertime, because they had plenty places to sleep and everything. See, they liked
it there. It was really nice. We lived there forty years while he lived.
He deeded it to my brother, who was single, my sister who was married -- she lived home with a little boy -- and I was single. He said he could die in piece if he saw us all with a home over our head. He thought about it for a year before he went down to Howard Coburn and made out this will
- a deed. It's not a will. He didn't will it to us. What we had to give him was a dollar for the house. He said, "You can do what you want to with it. Sell it or keep it. I'm sure you can keep it up." I wanted to turn my share back. I was - asking him how in the world I could keep up my expenses. They did it all right anyway.
The race track was there. We took roomers.
We had plenty of roomers there when they were there. But, you know, in a way, I wish they'd kept that there. That brought business to the town. But they got rid of it because they said it brought a lot of touts to the town that never left. "Bums," they called them, the town did.
Now, I think we'd been better if they'd stayed instead of National Guard.
We used to go to the races. We used to get a
lot of passes. We went and went. And we used to
win, too, on that daily double bet. My father was a watchman out there. My brother worked with the
horses. He used to hear the horses were going to going to do. Of course,
people talk about what do and what they weren't we went by numbers, my
sister and I. We went by the jockey - not the
horse. We picked out the the races every day.
good jockey. We went to
This one day -- I think it was on a Saturday.
My father was a big man - six feet, four. This
bunch of boys, whoever they were, came in over the
fence. They just knocked practically walked right
him over (chuckles] and over top of him and ot
in the race track. He was telling his boss. He said, "Let them do it, Mike. Let them do it.
Don't try to stop them when they come in like
that. Your health is more there, and they were gone,
important." He got up I guess. That's the
only thing that ever happened to him.
He'd never bet a horse in his life. So he
bet on this horse that was supposed to come in.
The dog-gone horse somehow jockey was killed and the
or another fell. The horse broke his neck.
He made the biggest joke out of that. He was real
comical. He had that Irish wit, too, my father.
It sort of runs in their family, anyway, all the
way down. He said, "The first time I ever bet a horse in my life, he would have to break his neck." [chuckles] So he didn't get any money on
that. Oh, my. Something. He was really full of
fun. He was town thought everybody.
jolly all the time. Everybody in an awful lot of him. He knew
He was put on the juries and all the grand
juries on the county. They said he had such good
judgment of things and people. He was always up
in Blair. Years ago, they locked them up for a
week sometimes till they all had the same
decision. They used to send in their meals to
them, but now they don't. You have to pay for
your meals. changed since then. He
used to be up stay in there
there sometimes a week at a time, till they made -- Everybody had to
agree, see. Some didn't always do it. But they
tried some terrible cases years ago. I can't think
of anything right now.
I'm trying to think about some of the stores
downtown that Q: How about the MB: I've got that
I wanted to tell you about. double-decker bridge?
over there on a paper if you want to
read it. I copied out of different books,
different things I found. Too bad they didn't
leave that up. That wasn't bothering anything. That would have been nice for the historical part.
I wonder what decided them into making Havre de Grace historical.
Q: I guess that it's so old. It has so much history to it.
MB: There's Lafayette Hotel. That's where [marquis de] Lafayette stayed. I mean, the American Legion that it is now. He slept here. I often said I don't know how he ever fought many wars much. He was always sleeping everything everyplace, Washington, wasn't he? [chuckles] He slept everyplace, seems like. Washington street. You must have came down that street. Oh, my. Hey, he had -- what do you call it? -- wooden teeth.
They're down in the Smithsonian Institute. We went down there one time on a trip with the senior citizens. It's the first time I ever saw wooden teeth. I wonder how he ever kept them in.
Q: [chuckles) I don't know.
MB: I never heard tell of wooden teeth. I don't know how they even thought of that. Now they make them out of -- what do you call it? -- plastic and everything else.
I never cared a whole lot for history, to
tell you the truth, when I was in school.
BOYD 34
History, no. Algebra -- I used to hate that stuff. Anything to do with figures, I hated it. A lot of people love it. I don't. I like English and spelling and literature and stuff like that.
They had a limerick here in Havre de Grace in The Record paper. They had three lines. I'll never forget it. You had to write the last line. Whoever was picked out for the last line that they thought was the best, would get ten tickets to the opera house for two dollars and fifty cents. I made up the last line and I never told my family anything about it. I thought, "Oh, that old line's not going to win. I'm going to just send it in anyway."
What it said was: "I couldn't live in Okington." You know, Okington is famous, too. "The reason you should know. There is no attraction there," and I wrote, "You can't even spend your dough." And they picked me out. (chuckles] When they saw that in the paper with my name in it, my father and all of them, my land, they didn't even know I'd sent it in. I never told anybody anything about it. I wrote that and I thought that wouldn't win anything anyway.
everybody was doing it.
I started writing poetry when I was taking
BOYD 35
care of this lady up in Germantown for a while. That's where I decided that I wanted to be a nurse. I thought, "I'm going to do something professional. I'm doing it here and not
getting the right amount of money you could get if you were doing that." After she died, I took it up. I stayed there where she did. She couldn't hear. Well, she had a broken hip before I got there, and they wanted somebody to stay with her.
Her sister gave her an old coat. It was in the wintertime. The room was kind of cold upstairs in the Colonial Inn. It had like a bay window. She had a nice room. Her sister told her to throw it over her feet when she sat in the chair. She was getting old. She was eighty then. When she went to get up, she forgot about the coat and fell and broke her hip. So it wouldn't knit around the bone. The tissues wouldn't knit. They got a woman over there. They asked for a companion first. Well, that woman needed more than a companion. All the woman did was sit and look at her - didn't give her a bath, didn't do anything for her. So they got rid of her. I had put an ad in the paper. I'd been up to visit my sister. They answered it over there at the Colonial Inn. Mr. ( ] Halem was the
BOYD 36
manager, so he answered it for these people, the Peaks, her nephews. One of them was power of attorney for her. Her name was Elizabeth Parent.
He came all the way over to my sister's. I was just getting ready to go home since I didn't hear anything from it for a few days. He came over there after me. She said, "She's just getting ready to go back to Havre de Grace. She's going home."
He said, "Well, tell her to wait. There's an answer to her ad she put in the paper."
So he took me over there, and I stayed. She couldn't walk, of course. She couldn't hearr She couldn't see. That woman had the best disposition of anybody I've ever been around in my life. She played the piano at one time, too. When she started getting a little senile, she would take her hands like she was playing the piano and sing. She took singing lessons at one time. But she said the woman told her she was wasting her money, she might as well stop, [chuckles] when she was young. So she was doing that.
I started to write at hers. I wrote about this little farm we lived on. That woman got me to read that to her, I think, two or three times a day. She liked the part: "My mother was a lady,
BOYD 37
my father was a gent." That's how I started out with it. And she just loved those things you wrote. I wrote about different things.
Q: I'd like to hear that.
MB: Oh, it's real long. I'd have to get it and let you read it sometime. It's put away there in the trunk with all that other stuff. I had one printed in Havre de Grace Record, called "Autumn." See, if that editor likes what you write, he'll print it. He put it in the paper. Of course, everybody in here that gets the paper, saw it, called up, and told you they thought it was a nice poem. He put an autumn scene on it and put Lt down in that page where it says "Opinions," down on the bottom. He said it was very good. I haven't taken any more down there, but some of these days, I think I'll take a couple down.
But she was my inspiration, that woman, nobody else, to do it.
I wrote one and recited it down at the Nutrition. I go down there -- I haven't been down there for a couple weeks -- play the piano down here where they eat their lunch. And I play the piano down at the Breva Nursing Home twice a month for the sing-alongs for the shut-ins. I play at the Citizens' Nursing Home. I played for
BOYD 38
the talent show two or three years ago in Aberdeen. We have a choir. We went out there and we were one of the things on the bulletin thing.
But we didn't get any prize or anything. Somebody else got it. I think the woman with the spoons got it. She played spoons all over her body. She was pretty good. And then, they had a man. I can't think what his name is. But he's on this board of the Nutrition, that you go around to different places and talk about food. I'm on that, too, by the way. They elected me down there. You're supposed to say whether the food's good or not or what you should have that you'-re
not getting.
He started to sing "I Left My Heart In San Francisco." I played it for him. That man was so off-key, he couldn't even stay on-key. I said, "You're not even on the key!" So I stopped playing and let him sing it by himself. He was way off. He didn't get anything for it either, though. I can't think what his name was. They said he's not a hundred percent in the brain. I don't know whether he is or not. He doesn't act like it sometimes at his meetings.
Q: Where did you learn to play the piano?
MB: I took from Margaret McDonald here when I was
BOYD 39
eight years old. I've been playing ever since then. Of course, I'm getting a lot of practice now. I got that little organ. My niece gave it to me. She got it at a yard sale. There's only one thing wrong. The D key on the bass won't play. Of course, all the other ones will. But if I had a bedroom apartment here, I'd buy one of those organs up there at Kimball's. The man tried to sell me one. I said, "I don't have anyplace to put it in a one-room." I wouldn't either. Of course, two or three of them in here have them.
They play what's in that little book.
My sister played. picture there.
Maggie [ ]. She died when she was forty-seven. We played duets at, oh, everything that went on for and everything years ago, when we were both young. Everybody got you to do it. That's how we first started out.
But this new activities director they have down here at the Breva, she gets me down there twice a month now, where the other ones only had you once. But she says she thinks it does a lot for the people and they like it. Then, I go down there on Wednesday morning -- I didn't go today, though, because you were coming -- at eleven o'clock and play bingo for the patients on the
BOYD 40
second floor that can't come down. They take their trays up to them to eat.
One old lady down there -- of course, she's senile -- she said to me last week, "You know what?" she said to this other woman that helps, "You know, they were supposed to take that lady away from here yesterday, but they didn't come to get her. They were supposed to take her away from here today, but they didn't come and get her." Of course, you go along with them when they talk like that.
I said, "Yes, they were supposed to come
yesterday, but they didn't come after me either." [chuckles) I was only down there playing the piano, but she was upstairs.
So she called yesterday. Her name is Lucy Bernier from Aberdeen. Do you know her? The new activity director. She wanted to know if I could come down on the twenty-first of May and the twenty-ninth to play for them again.
And that pillow here -- One of the patients
down there, ninety years old, she makes this out of wash cloths. I do, too. But I punch the holes with an awl, and she takes like a crochet needle and she puts all that fringe in with her fingers. Because I played all her old-fashioned
BOYD 41
songs she liked without any singing, she made that pillow for me.
Q: Wasn't that nice.
MB: Yes. I didn't want to take it. But the woman said, "Take it. She wants you to have it. She made it for you." So then I took it home.
Some other woman down there said that she went with this man for thirty-five years. She was in Spring Grove till she came up there. Her mind was a little bit off. They had played bingo, and they put all these plastic leis around their necks like they have in Hawaii. She said, "Do you know how to play 'Gypsy Love Song.'"
I said, "Yes. Why? Why do you want just that song played?"
She said, "My boyfriend I went with for thirty-five years sang that to me all the time."
I said, "Why didn't you marry him?"
But then, see, her mind went off and he married somebody else. Be darned if she didn't marry him now that he's a widower. They said she married him six months ago, and they're living happily ever after in Aberdeen. But she was still a little bit off, my lands.
so she put that around my neck and wanted me
to have it. They were taking pictures down there.
They had Volunteers' Day once a year. That was last Tuesday, I think it· was. Of course, when you do something, you go down there. I was invited down there for lunch. She said it was supposed to be chicken, the activities director.
I said, "This is the funniest looking chicken I've ever seen." It was the best calves liver I've ever tasted [chuckles) with onions on top. It was really good - the whole works. And then, we had pie for dessert - lemon and all kinds. And then, they take pictures down there of everybody. They always give you one.
But she wanted me to have that lei so bad. so I looked at the other activities director. I said, "Shall I take it? I don't like to take it from her. She just got it herself."
She said, "Look, anything they want to give you, you take. They want you to have it."
So she put it around my neck and I've still got it. But I couldn't believe that she got married. My heavens. He must be a little off, too. He'd have to be to marry somebody that is, don't you think?
Q: [chuckles) Well, I don't know.
MB: Well, I think so. Did you interview somebody yesterday?
Q:
MB:
Q:
No.
Don't do it every day?
No. I try just to do it Monday, Wednesday -- End of Interview

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Transcript

Mae Boyd, April 29, 1981 - Memories/Havre de Grace Harford County Library oral History Collection
Q:
BOYD:
Where were you born?
I was born at 823 Erie Street, Havre de Grace, Maryland. That's three or four streets up - four streets up, I think. We lived on what you'd call a little farm. It had a lot of horses and cows. My father had a big garden. Of course, he had nine children to raise. I was the youngest of nine, and I outlived every one of them. They didn't expect to raise me when I was growing up, though, at all, and here I am and they're all dead. So I'm here - must be for a reason.
Q: You said it was a farm?
MB: We called it a farm. He had a lot of land. It was in the city limits, but it had a lot of ground to it. So we called it a farm, see, because he had a lot of horses and cows. He raised everything but pigs in turkeys. And they had a branch that ran through the land. We swam in it in the summer because it was deep enough, and then skated on it in the winter time, too.
Across from that, he rented a house-like.
The man turned it into a bakery. Oh, we used to go down there and that man used to give us all kinds of cookies. Of course, we were fascinated with the beads on top. We called them "beads" -
colored candy they were. We were always over there and he was always giving us something from the bakery, my sister and I. She was two years older. We were down there a lot - through the woods. Picked flowers. They were all wildflowers. You don't even see those kind of flowers anymore - calves' lips and jack-in-the­ pulpits and all that kind. And we weren't even afraid of snakes. I don't remember ever seeing any, but it was like a woods attached to the place.
We had a wonderful childhood, though - all of us did. Some people can't say that. It's kids today, a lot of them haven't had. All they do is dope. We never heard the word "dope." Nobody ever heard tell of taking dope years ago like they do now, or anything like that. Everything you did was, I'd say, wholesome fun. Today it isn't.
They can't be satisfied with anything, it seems like.
Q: Did your father do farming or did he do something
else besides that?
MB: He farmed that, yes. Q: What did they raise?
MB: They raised all kinds of crops. He had a big field up above that he rented that put in tomatoes. We all picked tomatoes, don't think we
didn't, till we got tired of looking at tomatoes. And then, my brother-in-law had a truck. He took them down to the ketchup factory and he sold it to there, and they made ketchup out of them.
Q: Where was that at?
MB: That was up by Angel Hills Cemetery - that big lot (I guess it's still there) this side of it, coming down the hill.
Q: And they made ketchup there.
MB: No. They made ketchup downtown in the -- What was the name of that place? I don't know if you're familiar with Havre de Grace, where they made the ketchup downtown - this big building. where a lot of people worked.
Q: I've never heard about that. MB: You didn't?
Q: No.
MB: Nobody mentioned it , I guess. They had a place here where they built ships, a shipbuilding place downtown, too. I'm surprised somebody didn't mention that.
They had a store downtown, next to the old
post office (you know where the old post office was?) called Mattingly's. Men used to congregate in there. He sold cigars and the best chocolate candy you ever tasted and all kinds of hard candy
BOYD 4
and everything like that. So the men used to go in there. When you used to go in there for candy, you couldn't see anything for smoke. You could cut the smoke with a knife in there when you were kids. Everybody went in town for that candy. Of course, the men went in there to congregate and swap stories and all kinds of stuff like that.
They had the Ledger office here. That's out of business now. The Democratic Ledger was in business here for years. Leo and Joe Moore ran that. Of course, they had The Record, too. It was called The Record and it was called the Havre de Grace Republican then. And then, the Democratic Ledger was on this end of it.
When we came from school, of course we had to change our clothes to keep them clean for the next day. And then, we took the roller skates and went skating down to the corner all over the pavements that were there. Down from our house, down this hill, was like stones. There wasn't any pavement there. My heavens, it's all different now up Erie street. And before, up above us, they had what they called "Lilly Run" - a ranch-like where this dye You could smell this dye that came from the mill out there where they did all kinds of stuff to dye the materials. You could smell that
BOYD 5
all the time, coming down through this Lilly Run. That's all cleared out now. You can go all the way up there with cars, up to the next street. We couldn't before, unless you went through fields. [chuckles] Oh, my lands, I can remember all that. That's interesting.
Q: Yes, that is interesting. What was the town like
while you were growing up? everybody?
Did you know
MB:
Oh, yes. Everybody knew everybody. Every store was doing a prosperous business. Everybody was making some money. Looks like a ghost town now.
I'll tell you, there weren't as many what they call "tap rooms" as there are now. Every other place is a bar or something downtown now. Of course, they're making it all historical.
And that old lock house, we used to play in that. The water from the canal there used to be all around that first floor. We weren't a bit afraid. All of us kids uptown used to go in there and didn't think a thing of it. You know, you might get drowned or something like that. When you're young, you've got a lot more nerve than you have when you get older. You lose it, I think. I know I have on a lot of things. Afraid of this and afraid of that now.
We used to swim all over that river. Of course, we used to go out there when we couldn't swim, and float, a lot of us from all around the neighborhood. It was always (chuckles ) to keep you from getting drowned, I guess. We weren't afraid at all down there, and that river was really deep then. Don't think it wasn't. Of course, it was safer and cleaner than it is now,
too. I think they're dredging it all out and getting some of that pollution out of there - emptying out the water.
But we weren't allowed to go out on the river to skate at night. My brother and sister went, and her friend and his friend, which was a man friend. Of course, she had a man friend, Nellie
[ ], the oldest one. They were wonderful skaters. They skated all the way up to
before that dam was ever thought of, down to the park in the moonlight. But none of us younger ones were allowed to go. They had a good time, I think they did. And that river used to be frozen to the bottom every winter. Now, people around here, the young ones, don't believe that when you tell them. But it's been frozen since I grew up. Yes. When you could walk clear across
through. It wouldn't, I'd call it, defrost till spring. It wouldn't melt.
I don't remember the ice gorge. My cousin had died some time ago. He lived in
He was just, I guess, a little boy then when that was going on. He remembered it, though. They said it was terrible. I don't know.
Q: Was Garrett Island the B&O Island?
MB: Yes.
Q: Is that where your grandfather lived?
MB: Yes. Garrett Island, it was called. I couldn't remember that when I was telling that before on the phone. I couldn't remember the name of the island. I just said "B&O''· They had a tough time over there. Don't think they didn't. A lot of the children got malaria. A lot of cattle died.
After that, they had so much tough luck after their father died, they moved over here to McCabe's place which was up near the quarry. It was a farm.
My father was married twice. He had two
children. His first wife died when she was thirty-two. And then, after they moved over here to this place, my mother, who was from Chester, came down to visit some people on the other farm and he met her. That's how they got married. And
they had seven children. I was the last one of those. But she raised his two children. One was three years old, a boy, and the girl was seventeen months old. They didn't know anybody as their mother but her because they were real young when their mother died. We were all raised up together.
Q: What was your father's name?
MB: Michael Patrick Boyd. Four brothers in that family, Boyds, later on married four Conners women. They all had big families, so we were all double cousins. That's unusual. We never
even sent that to Ripley. We never even thought about that because he had in there two one time (two brothers and two sisters), but we never heard tell of four. I have one double cousin left.
She's ninety-two years old and lives down in Leesburg, Florida. I haven't seen her for years. We're the only double cousins left out of that bunch - a lot of them. Yes, I'd like to see her, but I don't expect to get down there. She never comes up this way. She used to live up this way and work here.
She went to Florida with my sister and
several young women years ago. Of all things, they had a man chaperon that went down on the boat
from Baltimore to Florida to work in those big hotels. Years ago, that's all the work they could get. She met this fellow, Ned Stevens , and eloped with him in no time, never told any of the women she was working with she was going to get married or anything. My sister made her dress and didn't even know she was going to get married or anything like that. They've lived down there forever. [chuckles) So that was love at first sight, I guess. They stayed together. He's dead now though.
Q: What was your school like? Where did you go to school?
MB: I went to the old school that they tore down -
Havre de Grace School where they tore down to build the gymnasium. Oh, boy, everybody hated to see that place torn down. That would have been a historical spot if it hadn't been. Yes.
Q: What was it like, going to school there?
MB: It was fine. We had a long walk from Erie Street, though, and walk home to your lunch, too. Lots of times, we skated to school on the sleet, but then
to skate on the river when we were old enough. My mother let us go down there, several more And my brothers went, too, so they could look out for you. One of them had to look out for us all the time. The older ones had to look after the younger ones. That gave them some responsibility, she thought. Well, I guess it did. Yes.
I've talked to you several times, but never met you. I asked my niece, Margie Joseph, if she knew you, because she knows nearly everybody up around Claire and all around here. She said no, she didn't.
I'll tell you what else they had in this­ town, and I wish they had it now. They had two nice movie houses. One was I don't think it was called The State then. Mr. Lester Lindsey ran it one time. The other one was The Opera House. Down there, they used to have plays. And they used to have, a lot of the time, a certain night of the week at The Opera House, a picture. And then, they'd have all these prizes. You'd keep the other end of your ticket. You'd have to go up on the stage and pick up a bunch of pans or
Of course, they'd all laugh at you and the different things you had to pick up. Some of them wouldn't go do it. They gave their ticket to
BOYD 11
somebody else. And they had groceries they gave away. Imagine giving groceries away now. They wouldn't do that. Well, the first thing you know, they didn't have it.
They had a library down in the City Hall, downstairs. That was the first, I think, library here. That was nice and near, too. Miss Sally Galloway was my eighth grade teacher. She had charge of the library there, one of the women.
But when I went to school, when I got in the tenth grade, Nellie Barron was teaching this commercial course I took. They had a new system there in bookkeeping. You know, I couldn't get that in my head for love nor money. I passed
in everything but that, so I didn't get back the next year to graduate because I'd have to take that same thing over. Several of us didn't. But that next year, they had a night school out here. It took up a little bit of everything and arithmetic and all that stuff. So I got a paper there. (chuckles ] I couldn't tell you where the paper is now though. I guess you'd call that a diploma then. If I knew you'd have to have the same teacher and the same thing, I probably wouldn't pass it again. I'd have stayed home then.
Q: After you got done with school, what did you do?
BOYD 12
MB: Downtown, they had the Baltimore Life Insurance.
Every summer, they took a different young woman in there to work three months the insurance books of the Baltimore Life Insurance.
They took me one year. Three months' work there. Then, I worked in the defense plant later on.
It used to be Frafrizio's up here. Haven't you ever heard of that place up above the B&O Railroad? Do you live in Blair?
Q: Yes.
MB: That's why you don't know too much about it here, I guess. They turned it into a defense plant where they ''filled the caps to kill the Japs, they called it. They had this thing. It looked like a sewing machine. It worked something like it. They made you drink. They gave you a pint of milk every day. You had to drink it whether you kept in down or not. I was real skinny for years. I think I weighed ninety-eight pounds till I was fifty. Now, I'm trying to get it off and I can't seem to do much with it. This lady across from us where I lived on Sigga Street then, they gave her a pint of milk, too. See, because this glue would affect your throat somehow if you didn't take the milk to take away the poison. If she drank milk, she'd go out in the backyard and bring it all up
there. So I drank her milk. I drank half a pint of somebody else's. I could drink all the milk I wanted because we had cows years ago and we were raised on milk and cream. It didn't make me fat at all or sick either. And the man thought they drank it, see, because nobody told him any different. But she didn't get anything wrong with her throat.
So I worked there. Didn't make much. Well, at that time, I guess it was all right. Eighteen dollars a week is all we got. Of course, you paid the man down the street a dollar or two to take you up there with five or six people in the car and bring you home. But it was interesting.
And then, they wanted two volunteers to work down in this building that had nothing in it but barrels of powder. That shows how you have nerve when you're young. None of the men would volunteer. So the lady across from me, my neighbor, Edith Hobson -- We went around together a lot. She came over to my house and I went over to hers. Just a nice, old lady. They said they wanted somebody to go down and nobody volunteered. I thought, somebody's got to go down there and do that or we won't have any work here. I said, "Well, I'll go down there."
So this lady said, "If Mae's going to get blown through the roof, I'm going to get blown through with her. I'll go down with her."
We went down there in this building and worked. You had to wear certain shoes on your feet. I think they were kind of like a sneaker. You couldn't spill one drop of powder on the floor because the friction, they said, would cause a fire. So every fifteen minutes, the boss would come down to see if we were still alive, he said. But you know, I wasn't bit afraid and neither was she. We stayed down there all the time till that place, I guess, was finished. Good Lord, it was something. I wouldn't do it again for love nor money, no - or a lot more things I did either.
I couldn't get over those men. I thought they're crazy or something. They should have gone down there. But they didn't want to go through the roof either, I guess. But nothing happened though.
They gave these -- It was a wooden tray. It
had about twelve little plastic They looked like vials like medicine would come in, only a little narrower. We would fill those with powder and leave the lids off alongside of it, and then send them up. The man would come down and take a
bunch of them up there to these people that would put the cap on with this glue from this machine. And then, they'd take them, I guess, over there to shoot the Japs with. That was something. I don't know why we did it, but we did. I think the men should have gone, but they didn't. I told them they were all a bunch of chickens up there, [chuckles) which they were. They were something.
It seems like there's a few years that I can't remember everything when I was sort of growing up. I can remember it when nobody's around here [chuckles) and put it down.
Q: What about being a practical nurse?
MB: There's my diploma. I went up to Philadelphia to the National School of Nursing and took that up.
Q: Why did you decide to do that? Were you interested in it?
MB: Well, I should have really gone in to be an R.N. after I finished and got a diploma, which I finally got a diploma. See? The girl across the street, Margaret Quirk, wanted me to go in, and several of my friends down at Mercy Hospital. But I wasn't interested in it then. When I got older, like middle-aged, I wanted a profession of some kind where I could go out and make some money, so I took that up. My niece is an R.N. up in
Media, Pennsylvania. She taught me how to give needles in the grapefruit and orange, like they teach you. She taught me a lot of stuff. So I think that's why I got along so well with examinations, the tests, because she had taught me so much ahead of time. The woman said, "Are you sure you haven taken this up some place else?"
I said, "No, this is the first time." I didn't tell her she taught me this stuff, see. I thought I didn't have to tell her that. What they don't know won't hurt them.
I got some nice jobs. I got some that
weren't so nice. Of course, I didn't stay on. those. Just leave till you find something better.
Q: How would you get your jobs?
MB: I would put an ad in the paper. I went up to New York after graduating to visit my cousins - just to visit. They said, "Mae, why don't you try to get something to do around here? Maybe you could find something close to us." They lived in Baldwin, Long Island.
I said, "Do you think something would turn up for me here?"
She said, "Yes. Try it."
I answered was over at Hicksville. The man had a son and a daughter. The daughter was an alcoholic, as I found out when I go there. The mother was a mentally sick woman. She had been in all the institutions and they couldn't help her.
The last one she was in, that she'd come out of the day I went there They didn't tell me she was like that. I don't know whether I would have gone there or not. Because she was really bad.
They had her in Saint Vincent's, which is supposed to be the best mental institution up there in New York around that part. They brought her home one Sunday afternoon and came over to my cousins and got me, and took me over there, the girl did. Of course, she was a little tipsy, but we got there all right. It seems like nothing ever happened to her in driving anyway. So we got over there, and I said, "I can't take care of that woman unless you have a hospital bed. This bed's too low. I'd
break my back for sure, taking care of anybody in bed." so they got a hospital bed from the Red Cross people, and she came.
She was what you call a "violent mental case. II They teach you how to do that when you have to take care of them. After she was home a while, she came out in the kitchen. She had this
doctor come to see her name was Mary Kelner. cousin over in Israel.
, and her She had married her first
It's a put-up job, see, to
marry her off. He was thirty-five years older
than her. They had these two children. They always resented their father because they said he was old enough to be their grandfather. He died before I got there. I understand it's the girl, being an alcoholic, is what set her mother off, and I think it had a whole lot to do with it, too. But the
boy was wonderful to her. Jeanette ( ], her name was. His was Stanley ( ]. They were Jewish people. Everybody I've worked fo seemed like were Jews, but they were all German Jews, and they claim they're the best to work for. I thought they were, the ones I had.
She was out in the kitchen one day. This doctor was going to come to see how she ate, see what she ate. So I got her lunch all ready.
Before she sat down, she opened this drawer where all the butcher knives, scissors, and everything were kept in there, and garden scissors. She pulled out this butcher knife, and she said to me, "I could kill you right there, closer than we are, in front of you."
(chuckles] Everything's going through my
head. Don't think it wasn't. I said, "But you wouldn't do that to me."
So while I was telling her that, she had it in her hand. You grab both their wrists and hold them tight. She dropped it. I said, "You know, it's time for you to sit down here now and eat your lunch because the doctor will be here pretty soon."
He came. While he was out there, he saw what she ate. After she got finished, I said, "It's time for you to take a nap," and I told him what she did.
He said, "That was quick thinking on that stuff."
I said, "Yes, but that's what they taught us in school."
Later on, when it came time for her to get a bath, she had to sit on the toilet. She couldn't get in the shower which they had or a tub. I had to keep her fingernails cut real close. Somehow or other this finger Her nails were sharp that day anyway, but they were short. So she grabbed me here (chuckles] while she was on the toilet.
She didn't want to get a bath, so she fought against it. I said, "We can get a bath some other time or tomorrow." She dug me. I still have the
mark there. I guess I'll carry it to my grave. And bleed! Of course, I had to get him over there and he cauterized it, her doctor. He went in there and talked to her and gave her a good talking to. See, she did these things because she couldn't remember she did them. You couldn't hold that against her then.
I stayed till she died - I guess about a year. She took these blood clots in her legs and died at four o'clock one afternoon in the hospital. She was a nice person till she got these kind of spells like.
Jeanette used to come over there and bring these girlfriends of hers in the evening. They actually would be drunk. I said, "Jeanette, what are you bringing these people over here for? Why do you come over when you're in this condition?
You know what it does to your mother. It gets her all upset. You have it to put up with after they go home." So she didn't come anymore much after that. They had a lovely home up there in Hicksville on Laura Street, I remember.
Somebody told me years ago that you haven't
lived till you lived in Brooklyn. I'd never seen Brooklyn before in my life till I went to New York. I worked in the old part of Brooklyn and
worked in the new part. So I saw both places and I thought, "Well, I don't know what's in either one of them. I don't know why anybody would make that remark." I probably didn't know what they meant anyway. I stayed on one street. I had six jobs, I think, in three weeks' time on one street. One would tell you about the other one when that one died. One of them did die. No, I think two died that were half dead when you went there.
One was a Polish Jewish man. Oh, he was awful! He used to chase you around the room and this and that and everything else. He had a wife right there. I came to take care of his wife She had a glass eye and you had to take care of her eye, give her a bath, or something like that.
They had a little, tiny, three-room apartment. He had diabetes. He used to go up the street when he wouldn't eat dinner. He did all the cooking. I didn't have to do any cooking. I didn't care about that, either. He did it. The men usually do in a Jewish family.
They had to make the living room in to my bedroom. They put curtains up. You couldn't get out in that kitchen, to the icebox or anything, unless you came through my room. At three o'clock in the morning -- He was a giant, big man. He looked like one of those men that are sewn together. I call them" looking men." He was old - eighty-some years old. This big, tall shadow, I saw. We had to leave a light on at night for the bathroom. I saw this shadow coming through, and it started in my room. I said, "What the hell are you doing in my room? (chuckles]
You don't belong in here. What are you doing?"
He said, "I'm going out in the kitchen to get that last piece of apple pie."
I said, "No, you're not. You're not supposed to have it anyway. You get the devil back in your room where you belong or I'm going to call your daughter over and I'm going to get out of here leave."
so he went back to bed then. I called the daughter up the next day. I said, "Your father's been acting crazy for a long time around here. I can't stay on this job." I gave them week's notice or two week's and left. They had a colored practical nurse ahead of me that had the same
BOYD 23
problems I was. She quit, too. I thought, "It's not worth it." She was a nice person though.
He wasn't supposed to touch her glass eye at all. This morning, he said he could take care of her eye. I said, "You're not allowed to touch her eye. Your fingers aren't clean or anything like that. You leave her eye alone." He did it anyway, and he cut her eye with his nail inside, so it started to bleed. His daughter came over there. And they had a daughter that lived upstairs, too, in the upstairs apartment. She came down and she banged him around. Don't think she didn't.
She said, "Miss Boyd, do you think my father's crazy?"
I said, "No. He's just getting real senile or something, or maybe a little crazy, too."
She said, "I can't stand him, and he's my own father." (chuckles) And she lived upstairs. Oh, my, they had a time there.
But, you know, I never knew -- A glass eye reminds me of something like a contact lens. It's real thin; it's real tiny. You just pop it right in and pop it out again like you do those. Of course, you have to wash your eye out afterwards. You had to do that a couple times a day.
I've had a lot of cancer cases - all kinds, inside and out. Terrible though, some of them. One lady I took care of up in Jamaica. I went to visit her, too. She got sick and just stayed there. She had a lump that was inside of her jaw. She was seventy-five years old then and a lovely person, too. After a while, it broke out and it came like three great big boils on the outside of her face. Her whole face opened up. It just reminded me of a canal. You could look through this opening about that wide in her cheek and see all the way down her throat. That woman suffered and she never complained. She never complained once about the pain. When the doctor came and was giving her these double needles so she wouldn't feel it, it didn't do any good. She died there in bed. Went down to skin and bones. She just lived a year, like they do. But she wasn't operated on or anything. Just wasted away.
When they took her to the undertaker up there, they couldn't keep her face together. So she was buried here in Havre de Grace in
where they're all buried here - Catholics. They tried it down at Pennington's, and they couldn't keep it together either. So they had to bury her in a closed casket. That was
the worst thing I ever did see, I think, for
cancer. All kinds of stuff.
Of course, when I started
out first, I took
care of the babies when their mothers came home
with them from the hospital, when they were young.
I wasn't that young, but I love kids anyway. When
I was going to get married, the fellow died. I
probably would have had a family and been a grandmother.
Yesterday, I got this (end of side one)
Were you taking that down?
Q: Yes.
card.
MB: Holy mackerel! I thought you hadn't started yet.
Oh, my. Hope I wasn't talking Q: No.
too much.
MB: What have you got on that Q: I've written down some of
paper?
the things you had said
about. What about the blacksmith on ?
MB: Oh, Lord, yes. That was too bad. That place
really isn't there now. That would have been some
historical spot. I forgot to say that hooked on
to that blacksmith shop was a wheelwright shop run
by Thomas Young. He lived down the street from
us. He used to sharpen all the tools and
everything there. Now it's an apartment house and
store where the blacksmith shop used to be. I think the whole place is now, all the way across.
Q: Do you remember people having horses and buggies in Havre de Grace?
MB: Yes. We even had a sleigh. We had a wonderful time because, see, we had horses. Pop had a sleigh and a horse. We used to go out in that sleigh every We had big snowstorms years ago. And it lasted a long time. We don't have those snowstorms much anymore - once in a while.
My father said they had races, horses, somehow or another with sleds on this river out here when it was frozen to the bottom in his day. Yes, they used to go down there and watch them. I don't know whether they were in them or not.
They used to take those sled rides. I think somebody wrote that down, that I was talking to. They used to stop at different houses that were mapped out in Havre de Grace for refreshments - like different countries would have this. That country would serve. The Italians would have an Italian dinner or some refreshments of Italian food. My sisters all went to that because they were older. My father had a big sled and put a lot of straw in it. It was like a straw ride when there was snow. My brothers went, too, to drive
the horses. They all enjoyed it. Of course, he charged for that. Never charged very much for anything years ago. He said he worked for a dollar a day many times when he was working.
Later on, he worked for the railroad. He cut
those banks off for the railroad. If he could come back now and see those terrible-looking banks, he wouldn't believe it (chuckles) because you could eat off of that grass. It just looked like velvet when he got finished with it. Later on, before he died, he got into the real estate business - bought and sold houses.
He lived to be eighty-two. My mother died when she was sixty-four. Now, years ago, they said, "Oh, she's old," when the people in the neighborhood came to see her in there, laid out. Today, that's young - sixty-four. Everybody says it is, anyway. We missed her. Don't think we didn't. She died so quick. She was only sick two days, and she was gone. Ulcerated stomach, they said it was. He lived sixteen years after her.
We had five girls in the family and four boys
- nine, counting the two sets. We enjoyed ourselves, though, up on that land and all that stuff we did. I'd swing down there. We put up swings. Every summer, all our relations came down
because there was always plenty to eat. He had a big garden in the back. They rode the horses till they nearly killed them. So we had to stop that. It sweated them up so much. City people weren't
used to horses or anything. down there, and stayed the
They did everything whole summer. We were
glad to see them all go home. [chuckles] We had
a houseful all the time. He built the house we
lived in. It's still there.
Q: Is it?
MB: Oh, yes - on Erie Street. shutters. But the people Italians and this man said
It was white with green who have it now are
his wife wanted that
green -- I don't know what it. What do you call that?
color green he called Aluminum siding put
on. He liked the white with the green shutters.
I said, "It looks like your she wanted." But it looked green than it does now.
He sold the place when
wife got what prettier white with
we left -- we hated to
leave that place, though, and come down to Sigga
Street -- and bought Russell the corner. It had an iron
Reasons big house on fence all the way
around it. I see the man's taken that down now.
I don't know what he did that for. There wasn't
anything wrong with the fence. That house was so
big that we moved into. It had a fireplace in every room. All the rooms on the third floor had walk-in fireplaces. Down in the kitchen, they had this big fireplace and they had all these brass things - I guess the people that lived there years ago. He kept on with it. The Reasons only lived in two rooms. He lived there with his mother and his sister. They only used the bedrooms. The living room was never used. They had like two living rooms together and a big hall that went from the front door all the way out to the kitchen. It had porches all over that place.
Plenty of room and great big rooms - sixteen by sixteen and high ceilings. It was nice and cool in summer. They had porches inside and out. They had a horse chestnut tree that my father got that down and built a garage out in the yard in the place. We had two English walnut trees there.
You never had to buy any kind of nuts for anything. Little ones coming in the back. All kinds of old-fashioned flowers, I guess, that were planted there. Grape vines and everything like that. We really had a good time in that house.
Don't think we didn't. And they still came, the people in the summertime, because they had plenty places to sleep and everything. See, they liked
it there. It was really nice. We lived there forty years while he lived.
He deeded it to my brother, who was single, my sister who was married -- she lived home with a little boy -- and I was single. He said he could die in piece if he saw us all with a home over our head. He thought about it for a year before he went down to Howard Coburn and made out this will
- a deed. It's not a will. He didn't will it to us. What we had to give him was a dollar for the house. He said, "You can do what you want to with it. Sell it or keep it. I'm sure you can keep it up." I wanted to turn my share back. I was - asking him how in the world I could keep up my expenses. They did it all right anyway.
The race track was there. We took roomers.
We had plenty of roomers there when they were there. But, you know, in a way, I wish they'd kept that there. That brought business to the town. But they got rid of it because they said it brought a lot of touts to the town that never left. "Bums," they called them, the town did.
Now, I think we'd been better if they'd stayed instead of National Guard.
We used to go to the races. We used to get a
lot of passes. We went and went. And we used to
win, too, on that daily double bet. My father was a watchman out there. My brother worked with the
horses. He used to hear the horses were going to going to do. Of course,
people talk about what do and what they weren't we went by numbers, my
sister and I. We went by the jockey - not the
horse. We picked out the the races every day.
good jockey. We went to
This one day -- I think it was on a Saturday.
My father was a big man - six feet, four. This
bunch of boys, whoever they were, came in over the
fence. They just knocked practically walked right
him over (chuckles] and over top of him and ot
in the race track. He was telling his boss. He said, "Let them do it, Mike. Let them do it.
Don't try to stop them when they come in like
that. Your health is more there, and they were gone,
important." He got up I guess. That's the
only thing that ever happened to him.
He'd never bet a horse in his life. So he
bet on this horse that was supposed to come in.
The dog-gone horse somehow jockey was killed and the
or another fell. The horse broke his neck.
He made the biggest joke out of that. He was real
comical. He had that Irish wit, too, my father.
It sort of runs in their family, anyway, all the
way down. He said, "The first time I ever bet a horse in my life, he would have to break his neck." [chuckles] So he didn't get any money on
that. Oh, my. Something. He was really full of
fun. He was town thought everybody.
jolly all the time. Everybody in an awful lot of him. He knew
He was put on the juries and all the grand
juries on the county. They said he had such good
judgment of things and people. He was always up
in Blair. Years ago, they locked them up for a
week sometimes till they all had the same
decision. They used to send in their meals to
them, but now they don't. You have to pay for
your meals. changed since then. He
used to be up stay in there
there sometimes a week at a time, till they made -- Everybody had to
agree, see. Some didn't always do it. But they
tried some terrible cases years ago. I can't think
of anything right now.
I'm trying to think about some of the stores
downtown that Q: How about the MB: I've got that
I wanted to tell you about. double-decker bridge?
over there on a paper if you want to
read it. I copied out of different books,
different things I found. Too bad they didn't
leave that up. That wasn't bothering anything. That would have been nice for the historical part.
I wonder what decided them into making Havre de Grace historical.
Q: I guess that it's so old. It has so much history to it.
MB: There's Lafayette Hotel. That's where [marquis de] Lafayette stayed. I mean, the American Legion that it is now. He slept here. I often said I don't know how he ever fought many wars much. He was always sleeping everything everyplace, Washington, wasn't he? [chuckles] He slept everyplace, seems like. Washington street. You must have came down that street. Oh, my. Hey, he had -- what do you call it? -- wooden teeth.
They're down in the Smithsonian Institute. We went down there one time on a trip with the senior citizens. It's the first time I ever saw wooden teeth. I wonder how he ever kept them in.
Q: [chuckles) I don't know.
MB: I never heard tell of wooden teeth. I don't know how they even thought of that. Now they make them out of -- what do you call it? -- plastic and everything else.
I never cared a whole lot for history, to
tell you the truth, when I was in school.
BOYD 34
History, no. Algebra -- I used to hate that stuff. Anything to do with figures, I hated it. A lot of people love it. I don't. I like English and spelling and literature and stuff like that.
They had a limerick here in Havre de Grace in The Record paper. They had three lines. I'll never forget it. You had to write the last line. Whoever was picked out for the last line that they thought was the best, would get ten tickets to the opera house for two dollars and fifty cents. I made up the last line and I never told my family anything about it. I thought, "Oh, that old line's not going to win. I'm going to just send it in anyway."
What it said was: "I couldn't live in Okington." You know, Okington is famous, too. "The reason you should know. There is no attraction there," and I wrote, "You can't even spend your dough." And they picked me out. (chuckles] When they saw that in the paper with my name in it, my father and all of them, my land, they didn't even know I'd sent it in. I never told anybody anything about it. I wrote that and I thought that wouldn't win anything anyway.
everybody was doing it.
I started writing poetry when I was taking
BOYD 35
care of this lady up in Germantown for a while. That's where I decided that I wanted to be a nurse. I thought, "I'm going to do something professional. I'm doing it here and not
getting the right amount of money you could get if you were doing that." After she died, I took it up. I stayed there where she did. She couldn't hear. Well, she had a broken hip before I got there, and they wanted somebody to stay with her.
Her sister gave her an old coat. It was in the wintertime. The room was kind of cold upstairs in the Colonial Inn. It had like a bay window. She had a nice room. Her sister told her to throw it over her feet when she sat in the chair. She was getting old. She was eighty then. When she went to get up, she forgot about the coat and fell and broke her hip. So it wouldn't knit around the bone. The tissues wouldn't knit. They got a woman over there. They asked for a companion first. Well, that woman needed more than a companion. All the woman did was sit and look at her - didn't give her a bath, didn't do anything for her. So they got rid of her. I had put an ad in the paper. I'd been up to visit my sister. They answered it over there at the Colonial Inn. Mr. ( ] Halem was the
BOYD 36
manager, so he answered it for these people, the Peaks, her nephews. One of them was power of attorney for her. Her name was Elizabeth Parent.
He came all the way over to my sister's. I was just getting ready to go home since I didn't hear anything from it for a few days. He came over there after me. She said, "She's just getting ready to go back to Havre de Grace. She's going home."
He said, "Well, tell her to wait. There's an answer to her ad she put in the paper."
So he took me over there, and I stayed. She couldn't walk, of course. She couldn't hearr She couldn't see. That woman had the best disposition of anybody I've ever been around in my life. She played the piano at one time, too. When she started getting a little senile, she would take her hands like she was playing the piano and sing. She took singing lessons at one time. But she said the woman told her she was wasting her money, she might as well stop, [chuckles] when she was young. So she was doing that.
I started to write at hers. I wrote about this little farm we lived on. That woman got me to read that to her, I think, two or three times a day. She liked the part: "My mother was a lady,
BOYD 37
my father was a gent." That's how I started out with it. And she just loved those things you wrote. I wrote about different things.
Q: I'd like to hear that.
MB: Oh, it's real long. I'd have to get it and let you read it sometime. It's put away there in the trunk with all that other stuff. I had one printed in Havre de Grace Record, called "Autumn." See, if that editor likes what you write, he'll print it. He put it in the paper. Of course, everybody in here that gets the paper, saw it, called up, and told you they thought it was a nice poem. He put an autumn scene on it and put Lt down in that page where it says "Opinions," down on the bottom. He said it was very good. I haven't taken any more down there, but some of these days, I think I'll take a couple down.
But she was my inspiration, that woman, nobody else, to do it.
I wrote one and recited it down at the Nutrition. I go down there -- I haven't been down there for a couple weeks -- play the piano down here where they eat their lunch. And I play the piano down at the Breva Nursing Home twice a month for the sing-alongs for the shut-ins. I play at the Citizens' Nursing Home. I played for
BOYD 38
the talent show two or three years ago in Aberdeen. We have a choir. We went out there and we were one of the things on the bulletin thing.
But we didn't get any prize or anything. Somebody else got it. I think the woman with the spoons got it. She played spoons all over her body. She was pretty good. And then, they had a man. I can't think what his name is. But he's on this board of the Nutrition, that you go around to different places and talk about food. I'm on that, too, by the way. They elected me down there. You're supposed to say whether the food's good or not or what you should have that you'-re
not getting.
He started to sing "I Left My Heart In San Francisco." I played it for him. That man was so off-key, he couldn't even stay on-key. I said, "You're not even on the key!" So I stopped playing and let him sing it by himself. He was way off. He didn't get anything for it either, though. I can't think what his name was. They said he's not a hundred percent in the brain. I don't know whether he is or not. He doesn't act like it sometimes at his meetings.
Q: Where did you learn to play the piano?
MB: I took from Margaret McDonald here when I was
BOYD 39
eight years old. I've been playing ever since then. Of course, I'm getting a lot of practice now. I got that little organ. My niece gave it to me. She got it at a yard sale. There's only one thing wrong. The D key on the bass won't play. Of course, all the other ones will. But if I had a bedroom apartment here, I'd buy one of those organs up there at Kimball's. The man tried to sell me one. I said, "I don't have anyplace to put it in a one-room." I wouldn't either. Of course, two or three of them in here have them.
They play what's in that little book.
My sister played. picture there.
Maggie [ ]. She died when she was forty-seven. We played duets at, oh, everything that went on for and everything years ago, when we were both young. Everybody got you to do it. That's how we first started out.
But this new activities director they have down here at the Breva, she gets me down there twice a month now, where the other ones only had you once. But she says she thinks it does a lot for the people and they like it. Then, I go down there on Wednesday morning -- I didn't go today, though, because you were coming -- at eleven o'clock and play bingo for the patients on the
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second floor that can't come down. They take their trays up to them to eat.
One old lady down there -- of course, she's senile -- she said to me last week, "You know what?" she said to this other woman that helps, "You know, they were supposed to take that lady away from here yesterday, but they didn't come to get her. They were supposed to take her away from here today, but they didn't come and get her." Of course, you go along with them when they talk like that.
I said, "Yes, they were supposed to come
yesterday, but they didn't come after me either." [chuckles) I was only down there playing the piano, but she was upstairs.
So she called yesterday. Her name is Lucy Bernier from Aberdeen. Do you know her? The new activity director. She wanted to know if I could come down on the twenty-first of May and the twenty-ninth to play for them again.
And that pillow here -- One of the patients
down there, ninety years old, she makes this out of wash cloths. I do, too. But I punch the holes with an awl, and she takes like a crochet needle and she puts all that fringe in with her fingers. Because I played all her old-fashioned
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songs she liked without any singing, she made that pillow for me.
Q: Wasn't that nice.
MB: Yes. I didn't want to take it. But the woman said, "Take it. She wants you to have it. She made it for you." So then I took it home.
Some other woman down there said that she went with this man for thirty-five years. She was in Spring Grove till she came up there. Her mind was a little bit off. They had played bingo, and they put all these plastic leis around their necks like they have in Hawaii. She said, "Do you know how to play 'Gypsy Love Song.'"
I said, "Yes. Why? Why do you want just that song played?"
She said, "My boyfriend I went with for thirty-five years sang that to me all the time."
I said, "Why didn't you marry him?"
But then, see, her mind went off and he married somebody else. Be darned if she didn't marry him now that he's a widower. They said she married him six months ago, and they're living happily ever after in Aberdeen. But she was still a little bit off, my lands.
so she put that around my neck and wanted me
to have it. They were taking pictures down there.
They had Volunteers' Day once a year. That was last Tuesday, I think it· was. Of course, when you do something, you go down there. I was invited down there for lunch. She said it was supposed to be chicken, the activities director.
I said, "This is the funniest looking chicken I've ever seen." It was the best calves liver I've ever tasted [chuckles) with onions on top. It was really good - the whole works. And then, we had pie for dessert - lemon and all kinds. And then, they take pictures down there of everybody. They always give you one.
But she wanted me to have that lei so bad. so I looked at the other activities director. I said, "Shall I take it? I don't like to take it from her. She just got it herself."
She said, "Look, anything they want to give you, you take. They want you to have it."
So she put it around my neck and I've still got it. But I couldn't believe that she got married. My heavens. He must be a little off, too. He'd have to be to marry somebody that is, don't you think?
Q: [chuckles) Well, I don't know.
MB: Well, I think so. Did you interview somebody yesterday?
Q:
MB:
Q:
No.
Don't do it every day?
No. I try just to do it Monday, Wednesday -- End of Interview